Bilawal’s plan for Karachi

The metropolitan city of Karachi – also known as the city of lights – with its multilingual demography holds key strategic importance in terms of trade, business, education and health. Karachi pulls skilled workers from across the country and provides equal opportunities to all. However, with the expanding population of Karachi the administrative requirements of the city have also increased and to fix this issue an effective local government system is the need of the hour.

The PPP recently passed the Sindh Local Government (Amendment) Bill in the Sindh Assembly, devolving powers to a third tier of government. The bill abolishes DMCs and replaces them with a town system – a prime demand of all opposition parties in Sindh. The bill was smoothly passed as the PPP holds majority in the assembly but still the provincial government tried its best to build a consensus among the other parties that are in opposition, unlike what was seen in the National Assembly where more than thirty bills were bulldozed in one day without consulting other stakeholders.

The Sindh Local Government Bill 2021 empowers union councils by giving them authority to collect property taxes and generate extra revenue to meet their needs; this power was earlier exercised by the Excise and Taxation Department which functions under the provincial government. The third-tier government has also been empowered to oversee the performance of waste management, local policing, education etc. The bill further empowers the upcoming mayor with an additional charge of KW&SB’s co-chairmanship. All these amendments were made after thorough consultations with opposition parties, but still unnecessary pandemonium was created in the Sindh Assembly.

The opposition parties in Sindh, mainly the MQM and the PTI, failed to gather any substantial attention of the public despite all the alarm-raising, probably because of the former’s past and the latter’s present. The city was directly under the influence of the MQM for the past 30 years with three terms of mayorship – Farooq Sattar (1988-1992), Mustafa Kamal (2005-2010) and Waseem Akhtar (2016-2020). Interestingly, the Jamaat-e-Islami also held three terms of mayorship in Karachi with two consecutive terms from 1979 till 1987 and later a third term from 2001 till 2005 but the dilemma is that these parties who have been controlling this city on and off are blaming the PPP for issues in Karachi, even though the PPP never had its own mayor in Karachi.

Bilawal’s pragmatic choice for Murtaza Wahab as Karachi’s administrator was largely welcomed by the people of Karachi. It shows that the chairman of the PPP is reading the pulse of the city where he was born and is keen to bring back the glory of Karachi which was lost in the violent past of the 80s and 90s due to ethnic politics. The people of Karachi are no longer willing to buy the stale ethnic card which the MQM and PTI are trying to sell. These two parties are creating discord amongst people just for their own political gains despite knowing that Karachi cannot afford this anymore. It is high time that the MQM after a major dismissal by the people of Karachi in the last general election and later in the NA-249 by-election gets over its 80s and 90s hangover.

The Sindh government tried to build a general consensus with all the opposition parties inside and outside parliament before tabling the bill but the opposition preferred noise over constructive discussion. Later, the PPP reached out to all the opposition parties again and assured them that their concerns would be taken seriously and that the devolution of power is an evolutionary process and cannot be done with knee-jerk decisions.

If we talk about the health sector, then the Sindh government has outshined the other three provinces. Be it NICVD, NICH, JPMC or GIMS – all these hospitals offer free healthcare, from heart surgery to liver and kidney transplant with free post-surgery care for patients. Chairman Bilawal’s aim is to uplift and build government hospitals that cater to the people. The health card offered by PM Imran Khan has limited capacity, and does not even cover one day in the ICU for Covid-19 patients and post-surgery care like long-term medication is also not included; all this is being provided in all government hospitals of Sindh. Moreover, government funds in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are said to be flowing to private hospitals via the health card which is certainly not a good sign for the government hospitals in these two provinces.

The core competence of the PPP is the health sector; therefore, the decision to bring the health sector completely under the umbrella of the Sindh government makes sense. Hospitals that were functioning under KMC could not match the performance level of those functioning under the Sindh government – for example, Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, KMDC, dispensaries etc are nowhere close to NICVD or JPMC. Now, the hospitals which were underperforming earlier will be managed in a much better way by the provincial government of Sindh.

The PPP always had the potential to win elections in Karachi but due to gerrymandering not just in national and provincial assembly seats but also in local bodies seats plus the prolonged fear factor PPP was not involved in key administrative affairs of this city. But now change is in the air; the PPP’s victory in the NA-249 Karachi by-election was a watershed moment. Later, we saw Peshawar’s welcoming response to Chairman Bilawal Bhutto and last but not the least the PPP’s comeback in Lahore – all this has built strong momentum in its favour.

Karachi was betrayed first by the MQM and then by the PTI but now the only viable option left is the PPP and if it successfully manages to get the mayorship of Karachi then surely Chairman Bilawal will leave no stone unturned to revive the glory of this metropolitan city.

The writer is a columnist and social activist.

He tweets @MustafaBaloch_